1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to portable carriers for handling mounted devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to portable carriers and a chassis assembly for housing hot-plug connected hard disk drives.
2. Art Background
Computer systems and information networks today require tremendous amounts of external data storage to satisfy the needs of users. To this end, mechanisms have been developed for housing multiple hard disk drives for storing large volumes of data. A recent advance in this field has been the introduction of "hot swappable" disk drives that may be added to or removed from a disk drive chassis or "cage" while power is being supplied to other disk drives in the cage. This is also referred to as "hot plug" connected disk drives.
Prior disk drive carriers for hot swappable disk drives suffered numerous disadvantages. The disadvantages have included requiring interface conversion circuitry being implemented within the disk drive carrier itself for converting from one connector protocol to another to support hot swappable drive connections not provided for by a previous disk drive chassis backplanes. This interface circuitry greatly increases the cost of the carrier. This excess cost is multiplied by the number of carriers supported by a given chassis configuration.
Another disadvantage of prior disk drive carriers has been the relatively cumbersome method required for locking and removing them from the drive cage. Particularly, prior art systems require two hands for implementing their locking mechanisms for locking the drive carrier into the cage and, likewise, two hands are required for removing them. Further, prior art hot plug disk drive carriers have not provided a convenient mechanism for carrying removed drives.
It can be seen from the foregoing that it would be desirable to provide a hot plug disk drive support apparatus which can be made much more inexpensively than the above-described prior carriers and which provides a simple mechanism for one-hand insertion and locking as well as one-hand removal and carrying of a disk drive carrier.